Day 1

Welcome to Adventures in Virtual Space!

On this site I'll be recording my journeys in Blizzard's massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) World of Warcraft. This is not a novel experiment but I do hope that it may provide some personal insite as well as insite for other researchers into what goes in the minds of people while they play games of this sort. I will state out right that the point of this travel journal is to examine my travels in the game would in a manner similar to Thoreau, Drieser, Kerouac, and others in their respective works.

Neither is this occasion my first foray into an online or world nor is it my first time playing World of Warcraft. What it will be is the first time I have made a concerted effort to record my thoughts about playing video games both as I play them and a post experience reflection. I plan to center the majority of posts a new avatar that I created, but I will supplement these posts with experiences that can only occur later in the game with my older avatars.

Alright so let's get the show on the road.

I take a seat in front my computer, start up the game which greets me with a rumble of drums and a login screen. I login with my user name and password provided for me by Blizzard because I have purchased the game for fifty dollars and pay fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents a month to be allowed the privilege of extending myself into the virtual world stored on one of their servers which I suppose is somewhere in the U.S. I can hear the ghost of McLuhan telling me I have moved at electric speed to an electronic no where that is everywhere, but is it Eden or a wasteland or a more habitable in between? I'd go with the third choice.

I am now connected to the login server where it defaults to the server I normally play on, Earthen Ring, but since I am seeking to stake out a new world I'm going to move to a recently created server that Blizzard created to deal with the massive influxes of players who received the game for the holidays. I click change realm, synonymous with server but a term that fits better with the Tolkien-esq atmosphere of Warcraft. I scroll down a huge list of servers that come in four varieties; normal, players versus player (PVP), role-playing(RP), and player versus player role-playing(PVP-RP). The most numerous of the categories is normal so I'll go with that so I can be sure that I get the predominate experience. Also the server I have been playing on for the last year is an RP server so it will be interesting to see how much is changed if anything. Finally, I double click on the Runetotem server and I'm swept into the character creation screen.

On this screen I am slapped with buckets of information, ok more like boxes. My choices on the screen are between eight different races: Humans, Trolls, Dwarves, Orcs, Night Elves, Tauren, Gnomes, and Undead. Once I have decided a race I am automatically entered into a faction Alliance or Horde depending on which race I have chosen. The Humans, Dwarves, Night Elves, and Gnomes are on the Alliance and the Trolls, Orcs, Tauren, and Undead are comprise the Horde. Both sides and each race comes with its own history that is summarized in boxes on the right hand side of the screen. Once the issue of race and side have been determine, next the class of my character needs to be determined.

There are nine classes to choose from each with specific traits and abilities that are intended to conform to a player's style of play. The trick here is to know what will be expected off you when you play with others because you'll eventually be spending all of your time in the role others give you even if you think it would be better to play differently. This is especially hard for new players because the only way they can find is by wading through Blizzard's forums or reading numerous other documents on the Net about the game. Thankfully though Blizzard's descriptions of each class are satisfactory even if a bit idealistic. The classes are warrior, rogue, druid, hunter, mage, priest, paladin (Alliance only), shaman (Horde only) and warlock. I won't go into detail about each for the time, but I'm certain I'll comment more on them all in later posts. I' going to go with a Druid, champions of nature, because I find it interesting to be a character in an electronic world whose purpose is philosophy is to be in harmony with the natural world.

Starting with gender. I'll have you know gender is a tricky subject in online games. First off it's a fact that play a female character is easier because other characters are more inclined to give you handouts and assistance but also even though female characters are predominately played by men when other male characters in the game discover you are faking there is some needling that goes on as a result. Being not fully comfortable with playing as a female character just yet, I choose to be a male Tauren. The Tauren being a bipedal Bison serves as an homage to my alma mater NDSU who's mascot is the Bison.

After gender a player can modify different physical attributes of their character depending on the race and gender of the character. I get to choose skin color, horn style and color, facial hair style, and face style. Once I have a character to my liking I get to create a name. This part I consider one of the most important and most frustrating of the character creation processes. I believe that a name should be short so that other players can type it quickly, it should be pronounceable so that players can remember it, it should also be representative of your avatar and lastly despite what I believe it has to be unique. This is the most painful part of the process because you can spend twenty minutes sitting in your chair trying to come up with the coolest name ever only to discover that some else has it. Not only is it a let down because so much time was wasted but also because it means I'm not as creative as I thought I was. Therefore I thought a bit for the first attempt but was shot down. In my usually shotgun flurry of frustration I entered a bunch of four letter words until one worked. Eventually settling on the name Gref mostly because the game let me but it does seem some somewhat appropriate, right?

Once I get into the game world I'm greeted by a plethora of new boxes filled with information, not the least being the main game screen which I see the main game world through. On the way bottom I have a row of squares, the first three have icons in them. These squares correspond to the number keys at the top of my keyboard so that the first square is 1, the second square is 2, and so on all of the way to =. After that there are a bunch of smaller squares with icons on them these are used for looking at your character, checking your list of friends, checking your spell book that contains not only magic spells but other special abilities a character can use, and so on. After that are a few more squares that contain the bags that hold all of the stuff you find in the world from swords and clothing to piles of dirt and lint. Directly above that on the left hand side of the screen is a window that gives the character various information in text form, mostly it's used for talking to other players, "chatting", but it can also be set up to tell the player how much damage she has done, whether a friend has logged on or off, how much experience was gained from completing a task, and tons of other information. Above that on the top left side is a portrait of the player with two bars connected to it: a green one, health when it reaches empty you die, and a blue one, magic when its empty the player can no longer cast spells. The second bar comes in two other varieties depending on your class for most it's blue for magic but the rogue has a yellow one for energy and the warrior has a red one for rage, both used to perform their unique abilities based on a unique set of rules of which those bars perform an important role. After that we head over to the left hand side of the screen where there is a circle with a small overhead view of my surroundings with an arrow representing my character at the center, this is the radar. Although it's called radar it's much more akin to GPS, no they do not have gnomish satellites in the game but it's so helpful that most players forgive its intrusion upon the fantasy world as with many other aspects that will be discussed later because this post is enormous as it is.

Alright, after getting my bearings inside of the games interface I'm ready to begin exploring. I start out in a small village that I believe is called Camp Narache. There are a few non-player characters, computer controlled hanging around who are all Tauren like me. The style of the lodgings are tepees and other Native American-esque domiciles, as is the clothing. The fellow immediately in front of me has a big yellow exclamation mark above his head, this means he has a quest. For the moment though I want to take in the scenery so I head off down the road. I run down the road for some time bumping into a couple player characters who I have at as I run past and get an occasional return wave. There's is some aggressive looking wild life along that side of the road that I deftly avoid, mostly wolves. I then pass by Bloodhoof village stopping to take a few pictures, but decide to continue on down the road and over an interesting looking bridge. I follow those road passing by more wolves, doesn't seem the roads are too busy this time of night. I eventually find myself before a few great plateaus that remind me quite a bit of Devil's Tower in South Dakota except that these plateaus have a city on top of them. Thankfully, the Tauren have mastered the engineer required to build an elevator to their city in the sky, or perhaps they enlisted goblins to do it for them. It's getting late at this point so I decide to find a good place to call it night. Of course, before I do that I take a few more pictures and then I locate a good cave on Spirit Rise to call it a night in. I log out, close the game, lift myself out of my chair, and go do something else.

Whew, long post but I wanted to get some of the basics out of the way, hopefully for my sake the next posts wont have so much to cover. Especially since cataloguing all of the details of the game wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

pictures!

Ta, ta!